Prisoners of Memory: A Jewish Family from Nazi Germany

By Joan Gluckauf Haahr

Growing up in a family of Holocaust survivors, Joan Haahr was aware from an early age of the devastation wrought by the Nazis and their sympathizers on Europe's Jewish population. She also witnessed firsthand the dysfunctions that plagued many of those who had made it out alive.
In Prisoners of Memory, Haahr realizes her lifelong ambition to uncover the stories behind the statistics in the Nazi records and learn as much as possible about the pre-war lives, deportations, and deaths of her grandparents and other close family members. Devoting herself fully to this project after retiring from her academic career, Haahr delves into troves of family letters, takes part in numerous conversations with those directly and indirectly affected by World War II, and gathers information from contacts in Germany, archives, and other historical research. In doing so, she seeks to understand the enduring legacy of tragedy as well as of perseverance and hope in the generations that followed the Holocaust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781946989901

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Part 1

Citizens

CHAPTER 1

Zwingenberg an der Bergstrasse

A few days before her death, having spent the past three months in a Bronx nursing home, my mother suddenly blurted out: I want to go home.

"Home? I asked. Where is home?"

"Zwingenberg, she said. I want to go back to Zwingenberg, naming the small German village of her birth that she had left in 1930, seventy years earlier, and to which she returned only once for a brief final visit to her family in 1934. The full name of the village, Zwingenberg an der Bergstrasse, translates literally as Between the Mountains on the Mountain Road," the mountains in question the low hills of the Odenwald, whose many vineyards produce the robust white wines for which the region is famous, and the Bergstrasse the old post road running alongside the mountains between Heidelberg and Darmstadt.

Like many young Jews of her generation with liberal leanings and few resources beyond intelligence and ambition, she had left Germany permanently after the Nazis came to power. But in 1962, while visiting Europe for the first time since her departure so many years earlier, she made an afternoon’s stop at her old village. That visit, in its way, reflected many of the ambiguities of postwar German life. Exiting the train, she walked from the station toward her childhood home, but hesitant to ring the bell she continued down the street toward the opposite end of the village. There she encountered an old schoolmate, whom she recognized and who immediately recognized her. He greeted her warmly, informing her that other members of their class still lived in the village and offering to lead her to the house of one of her old girlfriends. Gratefully she followed. They rang the bell, he made the introduction, and, after the excitement of the unexpected reunion had calmed, he left with a hug and a handshake. Imagine my mother’s feelings when, as soon as he was gone, her old friend burst out: "Gott in Himmel! I was terrified when I saw you coming with the SS!" Shocked, my mother learned that this friendly and helpful man had, during the Nazi period, been a member of the local branch of the SS, the Schutztaffel, the military police most responsible for initiating and carrying out Hitler’s Final Solution, the genocide of the Jews. Without doubt he had been a prime persecutor of her parents.

Later that same year, in a visit no less revealing of postwar German complexities, I made my first trip to Zwingenberg. It is the oldest of the several towns and villages along the Bergstrasse, and to this day four- and five hundred-year-old houses edge its narrow, cobbled streets. On my first visit, in January 1962, the houses were a uniform drab gray, their half-timbering rotting and deteriorated; the cobbled streets were uneven and treacherous, the stones having lain without repair since before the war. I have been there five times since then, and each time the village looks better, with the bright pastels of the restored stucco houses—now cheerily painted as if in a Disney fairy tale—contrasting boldly with their dark wood half-timbering. And the village now extends far beyond its original boundaries, housing affluent professionals from nearby Mannheim and Darmstadt.

My grandmother’s ancestors had owned the house at Obergasse 3 for many generations. It stood then, as it still stands today, on the old market square at the intersection of the two original main streets, the Obergasse (high street) and the Untergasse (low street). At the time of my initial visit, it was inhabited by the same family of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had purchased it for a meager token price in 1939, when my grandparents, like all Jews still remaining in the towns and villages on the Bergstrasse, had been forcibly relocated to the newly established ghetto in Frankfurt. My German half-sister, Lotte, had driven me there from her home in Mannheim. Lotte, ever intrepid, rang the bell and introduced us both to the old woman who answered the door. I was, Lotte announced, the granddaughter of the previous owners, Moritz and Martha Schack. Nervously wiping her hands on her apron, the old woman invited us in, leading us up the stairs and towards the rear while spilling out a non-stop litany of grief, regret, and fear. On and on she rambled: They too had suffered, lost their business, been forced to rely on the generosity of neighbors for food. Her son had been deported and killed.

Gradually I realized that she was terrified that I was there to reclaim the house. Only when she understood that my objectives were sentimental, not confiscatory, did she calm down and usher us through the tiny cluttered rooms. As I looked around, I understood why my mother’s invariable response to everything antique was a sneering, "That’s just like the old junk we had at home," although she used a less polite noun.

What I know about my mother’s family begins with the marriage of my maternal great-great-grandparents, Loeb Rothensies and Marianne Blumenfeld, in the 1830s. The surname Rothensies is an unusual one even in Germany, and there exist two differing recorded accounts of its origin when, in the wake of the Napoleonic secularizing reforms, German Jews—who had hitherto followed Hebrew custom and used the patronymic ben, meaning son of—were compelled to take secular surnames. In both accounts, a member of the family has been asked by a figure in authority (a municipal official in the first, a teacher in the second) to declare the chosen surname and replies "Roten sie’s," local dialect for Raten sie (You advise me or You guess it). Whether the response was a failed attempt at levity or derived from ignorance or confusion, the odd name evidently stuck.⁴

Loeb and Marianne had five children: three sons (David, Aron, and Joseph) and two daughters (Betty and Karoline), both sisters dying (as was recorded) in the prime of life. As family story has it, at some point during the tumultuous years following the 1848 uprisings in Europe, David and Joseph—the eldest and youngest of the Rothensies brothers—fled the German military draft and sailed to New York, eventually settling in upstate Delaware County, where they married two American Protestant sisters.⁵

The middle son, Aron, who remained home, was my great-grandfather. He and his wife, Sarah (née Dewald), went on to have six children — Lina (b. 1875), Max (b. 1876), Betty (b. 1877), Hermann (b. 1879), Martha (my grandmother, b. 1885), and Clara (b. 1888). Another son David (birthdate unrecorded) died in infancy.

I have in my possession a remarkable sepia photograph of the children, taken in 1889 or 1890, its occasion unknown. The four girls and two boys, ranging in age from teens to toddlers, gaze intently at the photographer—and at us. At the far left is Lina, fourteen or fifteen, wearing a dark, high-necked dress, its tightly buttoned bodice clearly revealing her developing figure. Her left arm encircles Clara, the youngest, about two, who stands on a chair and stares ahead unflinchingly, her tiny clenched fist the only sign of her unease at the photographer’s presence. Beside her, tall and handsome in his school jacket and tie, stands Max, perhaps thirteen; only his large, sad eyes hint at the misery that will lead him, already afflicted with the disease then called St. Vitus Dance (Sydenham’s chorea) to commit suicide at thirty. To the near right stands young Hermann, small for his ten years, in a military cadet’s jacket, his apparently restless arm stayed by his big sister Betty, to his right. Though only about twelve, she already shows the vigor and determination that will, in a few years, lead her to emigrate alone to America, where she will go on to play the role of family matriarch to her refugee nieces and nephew and their offspring until her death, in 1969, at the age of ninety-two. Only Martha, my grandmother, then a tiny four or five-year-old standing between two older siblings, looks anxious. Her hair (which I know to have been red) is cropped like a boy’s. Wearing a white ruff-like collar over her dark blouse, she is the only one of the children to seem intimidated by the evident solemnity of the occasion.

Martha was twenty-six when, in May 1911, she married Moritz Schack, the son of Nathan and Jüttel (Simon) Schack from the tiny farming village of Georgenhausen in the nearby Odenwald, where Nathan’s ancestors had lived for many generations. Two years Martha’s elder, Moritz had no doubt come to Zwingenberg to be married. Theirs was probably an arranged marriage, as finding suitable Jewish partners surely cannot have easy for those living in the small towns and villages of rural Hesse. Except for their Jewish religion, his family was no doubt indistinguishable from the other small farmers or shopkeepers in their community, with one exception: the undeniable Asian appearance of one or two in each generation, with the characteristic broad faces and ocular epicanthic fold of Asians. I am among them, as is my son and one of my granddaughters. Family legend attributes the Asian look to a purported ancestor from the Caucasus, a Jewish peddler (otherwise unidentified) who was said to have accompanied Napoleon’s armies as they returned from their disastrous defeat in Russia and settled in this fertile and pleasant part of Hesse.

As was the case with most rural German Jews, the family’s religious practices tended to be moderate, consisting of a loose celebration of the Sabbath and holy days in the local synagogue (if there was one), the standard communal rituals of bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals, and a steadfast refusal to eat pork. One family ritual my mother described with considerable amusement: each year before Rosh Hashonah, in honor of the coming new year, my grandfather’s father, Nathan Schack, would take his annual bath—an extraordinary event that took place in a large tub moved for the occasion to the front yard of his house. As his wife and children ran back and forth to fetch water boiling on the kitchen stove to maintain a constant temperature, my great-grandfather would shout non-stop, his greatest fear being that the unnatural immersion would cause him to catch cold and die. Despite the baths, he lived to the age of ninety-five, long enough that his last years were spent under the Nazi regime.

Not that anti-Semitism was unknown to the Jewish citizens of Georgenhausen-Reinheim or to my great-grandfather personally. In the Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt of December 13, 1912, a notice appeared explaining the omission of the name of Nathan Schack, honored veteran, winner of two iron crosses for valor, and long-time citizen of the community, from the memorial for surviving veterans of the wars of 1870-71:

Darmstadt: In the restoration of the Protestant church in Georgenhausen the name of the surviving Jew Nathan Schack was omitted on the commemorative plaque commemorating the war of 1870/71. The pastor is said to have done so on the grounds that the name of a Jew does not belong in a Protestant church.

Yet even after the Nazis were in power, the towns of Reinheim and its neighbors honored him by celebrating his ninetieth birthday. A local Jewish publication, The Israelite, published an account of the celebration:

Reinheim (Hesse), February 26 (1934): On February 17, the Old Veteran of 1866 and 1870, Mr. Nathan Schack, in nearby Georgenhausen, celebrated in full spiritual and physical well being on his 90th birthday. Not only the whole community took part in the celebration, which was led by the Mayor, but also neighboring communities…represented by their boards and teachers. Among the numerous congratulations and gifts was also a letter from President Hindenburg, who sent his picture to the celebrant with a handwritten signature. We wish the celebrant a continuing healthy life. Happy Birthday! May he live 120 years!

Even more astonishing, in 1935 (four years before his death), Nathan Schack had an experience that speaks directly to some of the anomalies of Jewish life in 1930s Germany. As the Nurnberg laws were more and more harshly enforced and Jews throughout Germany were increasingly banned from all aspects of economic and social life, a popular illustrated weekly magazine published on its cover a photo of my ninety-two-year-old great-grandfather sitting in front of his house, placidly smoking a traditional porcelain pipe. "Ein echter Odenwalder Bauer read the caption, a true Odenwald peasant. Captured by a passing photographer looking to illustrate an idyllic vision of an Aryan" fatherland, the image of an anonymous old Jew with his peasant pipe—intense of gaze, wrinkled of brow, and white of beard—was upheld as a symbol of a racially authentic German.

The village of Georgenhausen no longer exists. With my half-sister as guide, I tried to find it in 2003, driving through the Odenwald to Reinheim, the closest town. Each time we saw a passerby, we stopped the car and asked "Kennen Sie Georgenhausen?—Do you know Georgenhausen?—only we pronounced it Schorchenhause" as my mother had done, using the old Hessische dialect of her childhood rather than the now more prevalent Hochdeutsch with its hard g’s. Most had never heard of it. A few thought the name vaguely familiar but had no idea where it was. Only a couple of very old men remembered, directing us to an outlying section of Reinheim, into which the once autonomous village had been incorporated in 1979. All that remained of Georgenhausen were two or three old houses and the school.

After their marriage, Moritz and Martha Schack settled in Zwingenberg, one reason no doubt being that when her parents died my grandmother would inherit the family house. With her sister Betty in America, her brother Hermann in Saarbrücken, and her sisters Lina and Clara married and with their own homes nearby, Martha was the only one still living at home. Presumably, too, the larger village of Zwingenberg provided greater scope than his own for my grandfather’s ambition, which was to open his own butcher shop. For the first two or three years of their married life, before the First World War, things went relatively well. Then came the war. Like most other young German men, including Martha’s brother Hermann, Moritz was drafted into the Kaiser’s army. During the first year or so, he was still able to pay occasional visits home. In 1915, however, he was sent to fight on the Russian front. He returned only in 1920, having been wounded and captured by the Russians in September 1917, and spending two years in a Russian military prison. His compensation for those years: two Iron Crosses awarded for valor and his right hand shattered, the fingers partially blown off by shrapnel.

Moritz’s useless hand and generally weakened condition after his Russian imprisonment made the butcher’s trade no longer feasible, and few other employment options were available during that post-war time of military defeat and economic hardship. He became an itinerant tobacco salesman, selling cigarettes and cigars to taverns and restaurants all along the Bergstrasse. As my mother and aunts recalled, business was poor at best, at least partly because Moritz tended to favor the social aspects of the job, spending more and more time drinking and playing cards with his customers and less and less trying to sell his wares. Eventually declaring bankruptcy –according to the mayoral registry of 1925, my grandfather was fined 300 Reichsmark for a violation of the bankruptcy code— the business was for a time registered in my grandmother’s name, perhaps as a way of avoiding further fines.⁶

My mother, born in November 1912, was the first of Moritz and Martha’s five children—four girls and a boy. Her parents had planned to name her Ilse, but when her eight-year-old cousin Theo emphatically proclaimed Ilse to be a dog’s name, she was given the name Irma instead. Two more children arrived soon afterward: a brother, Leo, in 1913 and a sister, Lina, in 1915. Then came the war—and a hiatus—with the two youngest born only after their father’s return: Suzanne in 1923 and Margot in 1925. This near-annual arrival of children, however, could not continue. The family’s economic situation was too precarious, and my grandmother was yet frailer and more depressed in the war’s aftermath than she had been earlier. So following Margot’s birth, my grandmother’s widowed sister Lina, who lived next door, took matters into her own hands and banished my grandfather from the bedroom. Henceforth he slept downstairs alone.

Never strong, my grandmother was soon overwhelmed by the responsibilities of her growing family. After the birth of her first three children, while her husband was at the front, she had been diagnosed with severe softening of the bones and sent for six months to a sanatorium at Bad Nauheim. The children (Lina an infant, the other two barely toddlers) were distributed among various aunts and uncles, my mother going for an extended period to her father’s childless sister and her husband in Vilbel, north of Frankfurt. Her Tante Karoline was harsh and unaffectionate, and so sparing with food that my mother remembered being constantly hungry while staying there. My Aunt Lina confirmed the meanness. She, too, was sent there for a few weeks one summer, when she was seven or eight but, refusing to stay, left suddenly without even saying goodbye, surprising and shocking everyone by taking the train home alone.

My grandfather and Karoline were the offspring of their father’s second wife. The first had died young, possibly in childbirth. My mother and her sister spoke more fondly of a second aunt, Tante Rosalie, married to my grandfather’s older half-brother, Julius. Warm and expansive, Tante Rosalie loved to cook, invariably remarking, as she sat down with the family to enjoy the excellent meal she had prepared, Heut muss Ich mir Selbe loben. (Today I must praise myself.) As generous as her sister-in-law was mean, she customarily served her guests six eggs each for breakfast, a feast my Aunt Lina recalled with relish to the end of her almost ninety-nine-year life.

Jews had lived in Zwingenberg for at least six hundred years and were accepted—if not entirely welcomed—as members of the community. Jewish or Gentile, the men talked business and drank beer together in the dark paneled taproom of the Altes Brauhaus, built in 1682 and still open today, the oldest surviving half-timbered house on the Bergstrasse. The women mingled less, the Jewish housewives speaking chiefly with the owners and employees of the shops they patronized and the housemaids and washerwomen they employed to do the domestic dirty work—for, no matter how poor a Jewish family might be, there were always servants to help out, usually needy farmers’ wives eager for extra money. Christian and Jewish children were classmates and playmates, suffering together the severities of their often grim and humorless teachers (many among the first to join the Nazi Party) and gathering after school to play in the streets.

The unusual degree of assimilation of the rural Jews of Hesse was noted by Robert Goldman in a book about his childhood as a Jew in Germany:

Hessian Landjuden (country Jews) were probably among the most assimilated in Germany’s Jewish community of half a million. As small tradespeople, they were not part of the professional and intellectual community, as they were in the larger cities: Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich. They had lived in these villages for centuries. Within a generation or two after the emancipation, when Jews were granted citizenship in the mid-nineteenth century, they became Germans culturally; Judaism was only their religion. Having lived as tolerated usurers and tradesmen in the villages for hundreds of years, the emancipation seemed to set loose a pent-up need or demand for equality. And it expressed itself in a soaking-up of German culture, a demonstrative eagerness to become like their non-Jewish neighbors.⁷

The separate and not-quite-equal relationship of Jews and Christians in the old villages along the Bergstrasse was symbolized by their cemeteries. Christians were buried in the hallowed ground of the quaint churchyards within the villages; Jews from most of the towns and villages along the Bergstrasse found their last resting place in the isolated, if well-tended, Jewish cemetery at the edge of the village of Alsbach a few kilometers from Zwingenberg. For hundreds of years, its heavy iron gate guarded the fragile sandstone markers, the names of the dead engraved in Hebrew and only occasionally in German. However, even this changed under the Nazis: after the forced relocation to Frankfurt in 1939 of the remaining Bergstrasse Jews, the Jewish dead were buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Frankfurt (the old one too full for more gravesites). The old cemetery in Alsbach fell into ruin, its sandstone headstones crumbling and overgrown with moss. Only recently have the graves been mapped and the cemetery partly re- stored by a local organization devoted to memorializing the area’s vanished Jews.⁸

From the first—as she often told me and as her siblings, with varying degrees of resentment or resignation, confirmed—my mother was the brightest star in the family firmament. Not merely the first-born, she was an academic prodigy without peer in village memory. Her earliest school years were spent at the Kinderschule run by the Protestant congregation. As she wrote in an autobiographical essay during her seventieth year, she loved both the school and her teacher, Sister Philippine, and still in old age remembered fondly how all the children—whether Christian or Jewish—would go up to the church at 5 PM on the Sunday before Christmas. "There we sang Christmas carols and each child got a basket with goodies, also an apron, or gloves, or socks. Christmas carols are still my favorite songs today."⁹

After three years at Zwingenberg’s public primary school, she enrolled in the Höhere Töchter-Schule, the lycée in nearby Bensheim, where she received a full scholarship for the entire seven years. As always, she was at the top of her class, surpassing her classmates in almost every subject. Her school report, a thin, black book containing all her grades from the ages of ten to seventeen, was—throughout her life—one of her most precious possessions, brought with her to America and often exhibited for me to admire. "Look," my mother would say, holding before my eyes the yellowing pages, with their spidery German script: Religion: 1, Algebra: 1, Deutsch: 1, Französich [French]: 1, Geschichte [History]: 1, Geographie: 1, Naturgeschichte [Science]: 1." 1, of course, stood for excellent (which my mother always translated as perfect). There were a few 2s, less than perfect marks for drawing, singing, and sewing, but there was only one 3 (merely satisfactory), a constant throughout the book: Turnen (gymnastics). Physical activity was never my mother’s strong suit.

At Bensheim again she loved the school, often speaking of her friendships with the girls in her class, many of whom I felt I knew from the faded sepia photos in her school album. Largely photographed during school outings—weekend hikes in the densely wooded Odenwald or week-long cruises along the Rhine—they show a lively and close-knit group, some of the girls sporting traditional long braids, others—including my mother—with stylish bobs. A few depict cross-dressing young women playfully mugging for the camera during carnival festivities at Mardi Gras, in which all—Christians and Jews alike—evidently participated. Some of the later photos include men: members of a co-ed class eagerly raising their hands to be called on by the unseen teacher; a picnic in the woods, men and women casually intermingled; a group of laughing men astride a fallen log, the teacher—his student cap atop his head—amid them. My mother appears in most of the pictures, arms entwined with one or another of her friends (girls in the early ones, young women or young men in the later), her dark hair and eyes in striking contrast to her classmates’ blondness. No doubt, the ease and naturalness of these early friendships intensified my mother’s later sense of betrayal. As German Christians came under increasing pressure to distance themselves from Jews, her hitherto close friends (though often with embarrassment, she insisted) one by one let it be known that they no longer desired her company. When, in old age, my mother once more established contact with a former classmate, she treasured their correspondence, reading over and over—often in tears—her old friend Sigrid’s accounts of other classmates’ losing battles with time.

Nevertheless, my mother’s closest childhood friends were two Jewish girls, Liesl (Louise) Mainzer and Rosel David. Both came from families that had lived in Zwingenberg for generations. The three were inseparable, walking (later taking the train) together to school and meeting after school, often passing time in Liesl’s father’s lumberyard. One episode my mother remembered with glee: the three girls, then about ten years old, overheard a man ordering lumber in specific measurements. When Liesl’s father asked what he needed it for, the man replied, "A coffin for my wife."

"But is she dead?" asked Herr Mainzer, surprised.

"Not yet, but she soon will be," the man responded, leaving the astonished girls unsure whether he was expressing a threat, a sorrow, or a hope. My mother still giggled when she told the story. Both her friends left Germany in the 1930s and survived. Liesl emigrated to Los Angeles, and she and my mother exchanged birthday cards for many years, arranging to meet occasionally on Liesl’s rare trips to New York; Rosel settled in Haifa, Israel.

If my mother’s confidence in her abilities grew, so did her ambition. As long as she could remember, she had hungered to escape Zwingenberg, longing for Paris or—if that were impossible—the little Paris, Saarbrücken, in the independent Saarland. So when, in 1929, she completed her studies at the lycée, she did not, as everyone had expected, apply immediately to the Gymnasium, the prelude to university admission. Instead, to the dismay of both family members and teachers, she enrolled in a one-year business school program in Darmstadt, determined to become independent as soon as possible. As she described it: "I had learned a lot [at the lycée], a number of languages, and yet, when the time was up, I decided to go to the Höhere Handelsschule in Darmstadt, which would enable me to make money soon. There wasn’t much money at home, and many mouths to feed." Although she could not have known it then, this choice probably saved her life. Had she been immersed in a serious academic course of study, it is unlikely that she would have left Germany, as she did on completing the business program.

Few Germans, in truth, recognized the dangers in July 1932, when the Nazis won the two hundred and thirty seats that made them the largest single party in the Reichstag. Short of a majority, their impact seemed temporary, especially in light of their election losses later that year. Even in 1933, when Hindenburg, bowing to Nazi electoral